


steve's vanishing new york

by hupsoonheng



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M, New York City
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-19
Updated: 2016-09-19
Packaged: 2018-08-15 22:05:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8074363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hupsoonheng/pseuds/hupsoonheng
Summary: new york is nothing like steve remembered. but you can't force a city to be the way you remembered, any more than you can make a person remember who they were to you.





	

**Author's Note:**

> i started talking with [yawpkatsi](http://yawpkatsi.tumblr.com/) on tumblr and we had a chat about the deleted scene from avengers of steve wandering new york by himself, and my feelings as a new yorker who left the city only once, and suddenly i was being persuaded to write something comparing new york's transformation with bucky's. i hope this did the idea any justice? ANYWAY

You drive because you need to keep your focus on something that can't be interrupted. Like the road. Sam rides shotgun next to you, holding your phone in his lap with the GPS open while he sips on a big plastic cup of iced coffee. 

And in the backseat is Bucky. He might be asleep. He also might be pretending to be asleep. The only sound is the music Sam's playing from his phone, plugged in because the car isn't new enough to have Bluetooth. 

You pull into a parking lot, and put the car right at the edge of it. Across the street is the tall grass that marks the landfill, and to one side is where there's a sandy desire path to the beach. You lead the pack, and Sam brings up the rear. He left his coffee in the car, but his phone stays in his hand. Bucky walks between you, kicking at rabbit tracks. You try not to think of how it makes him look like a prisoner. Those days are gone. 

Your stay in Wakanda was short. Not because T'Challa's patience wore out, or because the United States welcomed you back. It was just—you had to come home. Sam had to come home, especially. The guilt of uprooting him has never left you, added to a mountain of lives you've ruined. It doesn't matter that Sam always tells you it was his choice—one of the most gratifying moments of the past six months was watching Sam lean down to hug and kiss his aging mother at the airport. Second on the list was when Darlene Wilson looked you up and down with a little smirk, and said, _He can stay._

So you made compromises. Most of them involved Bucky. 

Out in the battlefield, you thought you had Bucky back. He was quippy, fast, laughed at your references to people and places long gone. Here, in a place that's supposed to be home, with a man you're supposed to know, is where you find out you were wrong. 

"This is a long ass walk just to get to a beach," Bucky says from behind you. Same voice. Same inflections. A good trick. You look back at him. 

"You only think it's long because you don't know when it ends," Sam replies, kicking a little spray of sand at Bucky's calves. "Stop saying ass. You're an old man." 

"You say ass all the time, and you're pushing forty." Bucky jogs in place to kick sand back Sam's way. "I'm a young man to look at me." 

"Like you really think you look younger than I do." Sam snorts, speeding up to walk next to Bucky. There's not really enough room, and he almost knocks Bucky off the path and into the plant life. 

"Kids," you say, and they both look up at you. "Don't make me turn this car around." 

They both kick sand at you, big enough that a little gets in your mouth. You spit continuously, _pleh pleh pleh_ , and they laugh at you. At least they're having fun. 

The beach itself is devoid of most life. There are loons out on the water, too far from shore to really get a look at, and there's a gull here and there, but there aren't any other people. Not that there would be at Dead Horse Beach, on a brisk spring morning. 

"This place is uh- _glee_ ," Sam says, holding up his phone to snap a few shots. The entire shoreline is covered in garbage, none of it modern. A lot of glass, pottery, bricks, most of it broken. There's chunks of horse bone interspersed in the garbage. Except for the bones, it all comes from the eroding landfill behind you, visibly pregnant with more garbage on the verge of coming loose. 

The thing about the landfill, and the detritus that makes the beach gleam in the sun, is that it was capped in the 30s. You don't completely remember the logic you had that led you to think this was the place to take Bucky— _Hey, remember the garbage your ma made you take out? Remember the shit you literally threw away because it wasn't important?_ —but you're here now. 

Bucky is already way ahead of you and Sam, trudging down the beach with his polyester Captain America scarf trailing him in the wind. God, you hate that thing. That's probably why he wears it. You think he likes anything that gets a rise out of you. 

He squats by one particular pile of trash, his balance wobbly with his left arm still missing, but it doesn't really stop him. Bucky reaches into the sand to tug out a squat white jar, turning it over in his fingers. When you make it to his side, he says, "Think this ever belonged to one of us?" 

It's a Pond's Cold Cream jar, long empty, orphaned of its lid. "Probably not," you reply. "But it could've belonged to your mom. Or your sister." 

"My sister," Bucky murmurs, turning the jar over again. "Becca, right?" 

You hate that it's like a guessing game with him. Like it's not that he's trying to remember, but trying to give you the right answers. Like you're pushing him into being the man you remember. 

"Yeah, Becca," you agree, squinting as you look out over the water. You can see the parachute jump from here, way out on Coney Island. You remember when they built that thing. 

Bucky doesn't say anything else, so you look back down the beach to find Sam. He's climbed into a little boat half-buried in the sand. Graffiti covers what the sand doesn't. You head his way. 

"Somehow," you say as you brace yourself against the roof of the cabin, "I don't think this came from the landfill." 

"I forgot you're so old they didn't have boats in your day," Sam replies with a wry little twist of his mouth. He pats the grimy sand next to him, and you step over the lower edge of the back of the boat to sit next to him. Once you're settled you twine your fingers with his, and look back at Bucky. He's lining up bottles some ten feet away from the edge of the landfill. It makes you feel, for a moment, like you and Sam are his parents, watching their child play from a distance. You shut that feeling down quick. 

"I think Sandy did this," Sam says, and you turn your attention back to him. Hurricane Sandy did a lot of things. A boat barely big enough for two people is the least of her crimes. 

He looks out at the water, eyes unfocused the way they always do when he remembers. "My mom was safe. She was too far up to get much more than some wind and rain. One of her windows blew out and that was it." He told you before how his cousins in Far Rockaway weren't as lucky, although they all of them survived, at least. 

Sam does about as much remembering as you do, for a man sixty years and change your junior. It's the constant state of any New Yorker, particularly anyone who grew up here. Everyone has their own personal vanishing New York. When you walk with Sam, you don't feel as alone with your loneliness as he points out all the places he used to know, since gutted or demolished, replaced with something shiny. Some places have been gone a long time. Some still have their goodbye letters in the window. 

Of course, you didn't get to see the disappearance of the places you knew. You came out of the ice, and Times Square was the least jarring sight of all. Everything was so different you couldn't even remember what you missed. The neighborhood you grew up in is now for rich people only. So are a lot of neighborhoods you remember very differently. 

You took a trip to Coney Island by yourself and got confronted with _boutiques_ , of all things, glass and corporate logos, and for a minute you wished with your whole being for it to all burn to the ground, the way Coney Island is wont to do. You felt guilty about it, of course, but not as much as you probably should have been. 

Even the fucking trains are different, from the cars to the lines to the goddamn map. You might as well have woken up on Mars. 

There are landmarks, of course, that have stayed constant. Churches, mostly. There are neighborhoods where the buildings you watched get built in your childhood are still standing. But landmarks don't matter. Landmarks aren't where you spent time eating lunch with Bucky, or trying and failing to ask girls out, or getting the shit kicked out of you. 

The bones are the same. Nothing else is. 

"I think," Sam says, squeezing your hand, "you came out here with the express purpose of getting your feelings hurt." 

"Oh yeah? Where'd you get an idea like that?" You bring Sam's hand to your lips to kiss it. For all the terrors of the modern age, you love being free and easy with your affection for Sam. Sure, this is an empty strip of shoreline, but a street full of eyes wouldn't stop you, either. 

"Watching your stupid ass watching Bucky play with garbage," he says. He points in Bucky's direction with his chin, and you look. Bucky's somehow unearthed a brown glass Clorox bottle, like the kind your ma used to keep under the kitchen sink. It's actually whole, which is a surprise, and you think you read somewhere that the scavengers (poachers, the law calls them) who come here consider that precise item a holy grail of finds. Not that Bucky knows that. He sets it down just to punt it toward the water's edge. It doesn't make it, smashing open on other bottles and scaring off a pair of seagulls. So much for that treasure. 

"He's in there," you say, before you can stop yourself. Shit. You already know what Sam's gonna say. 

"He who?" There's that snort you knew was coming. "Steve." 

"I know." You sigh, and let go of Sam so you can push yourself to your feet. The side of the boat was starting to dig into your back, anyway. "'He's never gonna be the Bucky you knew.' You don't have to tell me." 

"Are you sure? Because you're acting like I do." Sam gets up, too, slapping the sand off his ass. 

"I'm sure." You give him a rueful smile, and Sam laughs. Sam laughing always makes you want to kiss him, so you do, standing right in this stupid little boat that someone wrote _I will miss you_ on. 

"Get a room!" Bucky bellows down the beach. 

"We got a whole boat!" Sam shouts back, and he and Bucky trade rude gestures for a solid fifteen seconds. Bucky tells you to get better taste in men. Sam calls him a bitter bitch and you have to stop Bucky from throwing an old Pepsi bottle at him. (It doesn't look like he would have thrown it hard enough to even come close to hitting Sam, but it's the principle of the thing.) 

It's not the first time you've thought about it. You came back to New York, and it wasn't your New York, but that didn't change the fact that it remains New York. There are new places you're learning to love. Nostalgia can be stagnant. 

You found Bucky, and he wasn't your Bucky. He's his own Bucky, now, irrevocably changed by more than a lifetime's worth of torture and death. He wants to be your friend because you say you already are, but maybe you say you are and it's only because he looks exactly like someone you used to know. Looks like him, sounds like him, walks like him. Even still cracks his knuckles one at a time like him. 

The bones are the same. Not much else is. But there's a new Bucky emerging, and he's your friend, too. 

And you can both make a new life, here in your vanished New York.

**Author's Note:**

> and ofc we know i couldn't leave sam out lmao. if you want to bother me on tumblr about this or anything else (esp sam-related) i'm [here](http://softsams.tumblr.com/)
> 
> i should note i guess that the title is a reference to [this blog](http://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/) which is sad to look at but a fairly thorough, up to date documentation of all the places that leave new york
> 
> and if you want to get a better idea of some of the visuals of dead horse bay, sure you can google it but [these are some of the pictures](http://softurl.tumblr.com/tagged/dead-horse-bay) i personally took when i went at the beginning of the year


End file.
